


Bless the Broken Roads

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Child Abuse, F/M, Fugitives, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, M/M, Mutant Tony Stark, News Media, Other, Pre-Slash, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-21 10:36:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6048361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As much as he detests the man, Tony knows he’ll have to thank senator Stern one day. After all, he gave Tony a life he never could have imagined, but wouldn’t trade for anything. He gave him Bruce.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Find me at the end of the world(and we'll build a better one together)

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Inspired by Rascal Flats’ “Bless the Broken Road”
> 
> An AU beginning in IM2 where Tony manifests as a mutant at the Senate hearing, and goes wildly AU from there.

He doesn’t really remember how it began. One moment he was courting disaster in the houses of world power, controlling the scene and working the room with the ease of thirty years’ practice, an ease he’d never take for granted again. 

He doesn’t remember when is began to slip, what started the unraveling. 

This he does know: it was sudden, but not. It was fast, but lasted an infinity. 

It was unexpected, but somehow he’d always known. 

It was life changing. No, life shattering. No one would argue that.  
He’d later argue the one he built out of the pieces was better, but that came later, much later.

He does remember this: it was a Sunday; it was raining outside. Happy brought umbrellas with little tulips on them. Pepper stayed home, she told him what suit to wear. It was the last time they’d ever speak civilly. 

Senator Stern was talking, wouldn’t stop talking, talking. 

He panicked. He was in a cave, but not. There was water on his lapel. A droplet hit his shirt, soaked through. Everything went black. 

Then, like a slow motion movie coming unstuck in reverse, super fast instead of super slow, the screaming started. 

Tony Ran. 

BBBB

 

Logically, Tony Stark understands the mathematics of time better than almost anyone out there. He knows just how bendable it is, that is stops for no man, not really. He hasn’t yet encountered anyone else who could break those laws. Maybe one day he will. 

But, even if he does, he knows nothing so astronomical happened that day. Not in terms of temporal physics anyway. 

In terms of his life, it was like restarting a heart that had drowned years before. 

It was a hole in the street café in a backwater dugout in the Philippines. Somehow, the owner managed to afford a small camp radio, which is partly what attracted Tony in the first place. 

He doesn’t look like Tony Stark anymore, scruff, grime, and pain washing away the trappings of his old iconography. He’s flipping randomly through a newspaper, pretending to read the headlines while surreptitiously scanning his surroundings. It’s been three weeks since he lost the latest tail in Bangkok, but he’s long past the stage of taking anything for granted. 

The radio begins to play a scratchy American soft rock station, the strident strains of Rascal Flats whining out of the radio with an intensity that doesn’t quite make it past annoying. Tony’s turning his head, trying to blot out the pain induced by the off key radio when the café door swings open. 

Tony doesn’t believe in fate, with much better evidential reasoning that most people on the planet will ever have access to, but time really does seem to slow the first time he espies Dr. Bruce Banner. 

Later, so much later, Tony will mark this as the moment he fell in love. Then, he didn’t know what that felt like yet.

Their eyes meet across the cramped space, blue connecting with brown, and suddenly something clicks. Tony’s head begins a familiar spin, and the edges of reality begin to blur. 

The rules of temporal mechanics are unbreakable. Tony Stark’s never met anyone who could break them. Other than himself. 

BBBB

Omega level mutants are extremely rare.

This statement, which Tony reads at the age of fifteen, printed in plain black text in the MIT library’s brand new encyclopedia, never fails to crack him up, even twenty years later. 

Saying Omega level mutants are extremely rare is like saying the Great Auk is only sort of extinct. 

Of the two which have been documented in the past half century, one went insane and nearly ripped apart the planet, and the other created a black hole off mars which only resolved when the unfortunate teenager allowed themselves to be sucked into the anomaly, allowing their own power to cancel out the energy drain. 

With that sort of track record, Tony has little interest in being classified as an Omega level mutant. Even in later years, he’s not sure what he is. But whatever it is, he’ll be damned if he lets anyone, including Miriam Webster, define him. 

BBBB

Tony is four when he manifests, according to his father. Bruce will one day speculate that Tony may have actually been born with an already active X-gene, an increasingly less rare phenomenon in the 21st century, but one that was literally unheard of in the 1970s. 

Regardless, the fact remains that Howard Stark walked in on his son slowing down the path of a bee in mid-flight, one lazy summer afternoon a couple months before Tony’s fifth birthday. 

Howard correctly assumed his son was a mutant, but made the mistaken assumption that Tony’s power was kinetic in nature, rather than temporal. This mistaken deduction allowed father and son to continue a relatively normal relationship-for them, Howard speaking and Tony nodding, Howard hurling drunken insults followed by fists, Tony getting much better at shutting down than he ever was at dodging- for a following two years. 

Then Tony turns seven, and makes a last ditch effort to impress his father by rewinding a badly mangled business related dinner party, unfreezing the room like taking a video camera off rewind from a recording to which his father had just been the only witness and audience. 

Strictly speaking, Tony doesn’t break the relationship-this is the closest he ever really gets to admitting his childhood traumas weren’t his fault, something Bruce literally spends a lifetime emphasizing repeatedly, hoping one day it will sink it. It does, sort of. 

Howard breaks everything all by himself, when he orders his seven-year-old to rewind more time-forty-five years to be exact. Tony’s refusal ends any semblance to non-total hatred towards his son on Howard’s part, and any chance at a semi-happy childhood for Tony. 

He never gets a chance to tell his father that the reason he refused wasn’t because he didn’t think he could do it. It was because he was sure he could, and even at seven years old, that thought terrified him beyond measure.

At best, Howard taught Tony he was a coward at heart. At worst, he shattered the heart of a little boy who’s only crime was not loving his daddy enough to be willing to shatter the universe for him.

BBBB

The media comes up with all kinds of descriptors for the Senate Incident-most involving accusations of mutant violence and instability, power corrupting, and I-told-you-so’s. 

Eye witness reports vary wildly, with the most consistent feature of all the accounts being the fact they all remember different events, like they were all present at a different version of one event in time. It’s a very accurate description of exactly what happens, so naturally, nobody pays it any attention.

Nobody is ever quite sure what “really” happened, so they speculate. Wildly. 

Crazier and crazier powers are bandied about, until Tony’s been branded an out of control super kinetic with severe unaddressed anger management and alcohol dependence issues.

Pepper never gives an official interview regarding the events at Congress, not one that Tony ever finds, and he can honestly say he did look. Partly just to see her face again. 

Six months after Tony disappears, he slips into the back of a packed sound stage and watches the love of his life deny their relationship on live television. 

It’s three days after Congress has officially declared Tony a Dangerous Mutant, and he can’t honestly say he blames Pepper for anything she does or says at that point. She has people to protect too. 

Until someone brings up the words Tony and alcohol in the same sentence, just as he’s about to slip quietly towards Pepper’s car to wait, to try to explain. 

Until his girlfriend of two years and best friend of ten tells Vanity Fair that Tony is exactly what the world’s always thought he was. An alcoholic playboy. 

Tony leaves the States the next day. It’s the last time he sets foot on American soil for nearly ten years. 

BBBB

When Tony is seventeen, both his parents are killed in a plane crash. He gets the news three hours later, and proceeds to get dangerously beyond blind drunk. It’s only the second time he’s tried alcohol, a fact which has a lot to do with a party in junior year where everyone woke up with a hangover, three days prior to the actual party, an event which only Tony now remembers. 

Tony never admits that the only reason he gets drunk upon learning he’s now an orphan is to prevent himself from saving them. He knows he could have. He tries not to think too hard about the fact he doesn’t. 

At the time, he thinks it’s the hardest thing he’ll ever have to do. Or not do, as the case may be. Obviously, he hadn’t been to Afghanistan yet. 

One unfortunate side effect of Tony’s grief induced binge session is that the time zones between New York and Hong Kong are never quite in sink again. 

Another side effect is the tabloids branding him an alcoholic. Tony chooses to keep the moniker because it provides a convenient shield for the side effects of suppressing his power 24/7. Unfortunately, this means he has to become an expert in slight of hand, and develop a liking for apple juice with various weird added flavours. 

He pulls off the act so well, that twenty years later, nobody’s figured it out, not even the Russian super spy sent to evaluate him. 

He’s apparently such a good actor that even his closest friends never caught a clue. 

BBBB

Since bringing a crow back to life at age six, and then watching an entire micro ecosystem rip apart as a consequence, Tony’s been very careful not to mess with the laws of life and death. 

It’s his most basic law. His prime directive. 

He violates it only once, unintentionally. As it happens, it takes him five years to realize he’s even broken the rule. 

Tony’s never loved Bruce more than the day the man looks him in the eye, and tells him he understands that Tony could break the laws of time for only one man, and it wasn’t Bruce.

BBBB

Tony doesn’t remember when he realized he’d fallen in love with Bruce. Really, he’s tried for years to pin it down to one moment or event. He thinks it might have been the first time their eyes connected. Or even the first time he met the Hulk. But, in the end, the simple truth is, he really can’t be sure. 

He just knows that one day he’s sitting in a hovel that’s main attraction is its lack of cockroaches, watching Bruce frown over some scientific equipment he’s scrounged together from goodness knows where. They’re both filthy, sleep deprived, and on the run from more government agencies that you can count on the four hands they have between them. And yet, in that one glorious instant of time, Tony can honestly say he’s never been happier.

BBBB 

Years and years from now, a not quite ignorant reporter will ask Tony if he’s ever rolled back time to visit ancient Rome. 

Tony stares for a long moment, and then begins to laugh hysterically. In retrospect, it’s probably not surprising that that’s pretty much the end of the interview. 

The bottom line is however, that he isn’t a TARDIS-he can’t simply roll, hop, skip, jump, or transport through time and then just pop back up. It doesn’t work like that. 

Granted, even after thirty years Tony isn’t quite sure himself how “it” works. He just knows that if he ever did get the urge to “roll back” time, it wouldn’t be to visit ancient Rome. 

He’s only tried it once, but once is a enough know that the only thing that terrifies him more than his ability to actually reverse time, is that he has no idea how to put it back together again afterwards. 

Tony can literally take time apart, and while he can fix almost anything, there are some things beyond even his capabilities. 

Tony’s answer to reporter guy, which on reflection is probably the actual reason the interview is never broadcast, is quite simple-he’s not a god. And he has no wish to become one. That’s one job even he’ll admit he’s grossly underqualified for.


	2. Home is where...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, Tony's life is a lot more like Doctor Who than anyone first thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely happy with this, but I thought I'd put it up and let you guys help me pick it apart ; )

Tony Stark never expected Clint Barton. Neither did Bruce Banner. They’d both already found the loves of their lives in each other. It never occurred to them that sometimes, everything really is better with three. 

TSBBCB

It took Tony all of two days to run off with Bruce. He didn’t even have to convince Bruce. He just collapsed at his feet, after gasping out “they’re coming”. 

He wakes up three days and eight hundred miles away, having been carried by Bruce-the skinny, puny human version, cause the Big Guy isn’t just glow in the dark kinda green-across three borders and two datelines, and remains wakeful just long enough to clarify that he meant the local cat ladies were coming to Bruce’s church hideout to preach to the feral population. 

Tony’s less than half way conscious by the time Bruce reacts, but he’ll always remember it as the first time he hears the man laugh. He’ll never forget it, it was that breathtaking. And heartwarming. Or something. 

Later, Tony will realize Bruce always laughs like that, sheer abandon warring with hysterical urgency. Then, he simply slips into unconsciousness, grateful for once for the poison that’s slowly killing him, as it prevents him from messing up the entire global market economy by freezing this moment in a continuous replay loop. 

TSBBCB

Finally stopping running was probably always going to end in guns and green rage monsters, but they survive it without bloodshed somehow, which they both count as a not so minor miracle. 

They let themselves be found. Although honestly, after over eight years’ experience as fugitives between them, three apart and five together, it would quite frankly be just embarrassing if they’d been caught without their own consent. 

The why of that moment, the timing of it, Tony’s never quite sure of-why not two years previously, when Tony was so ill he couldn’t hold his head up on his own, or a month later, when Bruce started his yearly pining for Betty around the anniversary of the day he met her, in another lifetime? 

Tony can’t answer that why. He just knows that 2567 days after he ran away from the world, he finally stopped, turned, and faced it. Head on. Only this time, he wasn’t alone. 

It was quite easy in the end, the stopping running business. SHIELD had been tracking them on and off for over a year, so one day, they simply stopped giving their tail the slip, and waited. Calmly. As they’d been planning since the day they first sensed a tail, and choose to wait just long enough to let it stick, just a bit. 

Of course, they didn’t count on the fact their tail was so inexperienced they almost literally squeaked, a byproduct of being assigned to a detail that was so cold it was practically dead from five straight years of dead ended leads. 

So, naturally, Mr. Rookie phoned the military. Peachy. 

Even better, instead of shooting at Bruce, Ross got the brilliant idea to shoot Tony. In the head. Still unsteady on his feet after four years of heavy metal poisoning, Tony didn’t move quite fast enough. 

Bruce did. 

Seconds or hours later, they’re surrounded by a ring of soldiers bristling with trigger happy fingers, Tony desperately trying to calm Hulk down while privately debating the wisdom of risking turning back the clock just a little, so they could bungle this less spectacularly badly. 

As it happens however, neither of them have to do anything. 

Turns out, someone out there in the world actually has a bigger death wish than Tony Stark. And it’s not Bruce Banner. Who’d have thunk it. 

If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, Tony wouldn’t have believed it. But then, from the first moment they set eyes on him, whether it was getting the Hulk to fall for him at first sight, or flirting with Tony while being chewed out by Immaculate-Suit-Coulson after walking unarmed into the middle of a volatile-is-the-understatement-of-the-year situation involving the Hulk and roughly half an armoury of weaponized metal, Clint Barton has always had a rather unique way of surprising them. 

Tony isn’t sure what it says about any of them that the third leg of their stilted tripod is the most insane of them all. 

BBSTCB

SHIELD doesn’t officially have relationship paperwork-they’re a secret super spy organization, not a speed dating corporation, but somehow, they still have a romance betting pool run out of the cafeteria. 

The two longest running-and therefore highest-pots are for the two scariest people in the building. Well sort of-nobody has the guts to bet on Coulson. 

Fury will probably be a mystery the agency never solves. 

The Avengers do solve this, along with the one nobody will bet on, which works fine for everybody, because they’ll never tell-one doesn’t tattle on the ‘rents after all. 

The other pot is eventually won by the Widow-nobodies surprised, she was the only one crazy enough to bet on a beyond unconventional relationship forming between three people who hadn’t even met yet. 

She never tells anyone what she does with the money, and nobody ever asks.   
The anonymous delivery of over a million silver St. Jude medals to the front steps of the pentagon is something which is never traced to anyone. Ever. 

BBTSCB

Everything isn’t peachy keen after that, despite what the media will later report (inaccurately, big wow there). The three of them don’t suddenly live happily ever after in a lovely threesome with wedding bands and oodles of sex (they will eventually, but that comes later, much later). 

Because, as persuasive as Coulson might be, even he can’t talk down bullets, or deflect them, and all it takes is one stupidly placed sniper shot hurtling into the wrong target with no warning, on orders nobody actually heard in time, for the whole almost resolved situation to literally blow up in their faces. 

Turns out Tony isn’t the only suppressed mutant running around.

BBCBTS

Running is the operative word, because when the dust clears, soldiers, generals, and SHIELD agents alike are left staring at a spot of empty space, where they could have sworn there were three people and a Giant Green Thing not five minutes previously-even odder, all their watches are now three hours fast. 

If they could slow down warped space time, what they’d observe would be a rather interesting Die-Hardesque performance of martial arts, diplomacy, hastily formed trust riddled alliances, unlikely reveals, and scrambled car theft. 

It culminates in a motley crew of two-temporarily former, until further notice-SHIELD agents, one buck naked guy, and one shell-shocked time bender piled awkwardly into a three seater Porsche.

Tony ends up on Bruce’s lap in the back, partly because they need to keep their faces hidden, and partly because somehow he’s the bottom in that relationship. 

And apparently Coulson was a secret car devil, as well as a secret mutant-who knew(well, Fury, and probably Nat, and definitely Clint because Phil actually told him after Beijing that one time, but who’s counting)

And just like that, they’re on the run again. It’s an exhilaratingly familiar feeling, although Tony’s trying not to get too sentimental. He’s got a good distraction to aid this in the form of watching Bruce watch Clint, who’s currently curled up in the shot gun seat, in a rather implausibly small ball-Clint’s all human, they know this from the first moment, and Sitwell should totally have upped the betting pool, because who would be crazy enough to bet on a threesome between a Human-Born Mutant-Engineered Mutant working out. 

However, little can distract Tony from the terrifyingly amazing realization that they are going home.

Turns out, Coulson’s also adopted. You’ll never guess who by. At this point, Bruce is distracted from studying Clint with magnetic intensity long enough to literally face palm at the ridiculousness of their lives. Tony can’t stop laughing for a good quarter of an hour.

BBTSCB

Home is an odd concept, one Tony’s always had problems with. His parents left him over half a dozen houses after their untimely death, and Obie left him a couple more(oh the irony)-yet not surprisingly enough he feels at home in none of them. 

For Tony, home will always be a building, just not one he ever lived in. He saw it only once as a child, in person at least, following his father around like a perfect little puppy, trying very hard to ignore the compassionate-to-point-of-tears-brimming-eyes following him for the entire two-hour tour. 

Howard makes very sure that Tony never sees the building, or the eyes again as a child, money trumping natural power any day, but Tony never forgets. 

He researches and relives and senses and imagines constantly about that hours brief sanctuary for the next thirty years, until he’s standing on the doorstep again. 

Bruce is his heart, his family, and his soul, but somehow, despite it all, as much as he knows it’s more than likely just transferred psychic residue and the lonely desperateness that was his mind as a child, Xavier’s School for the Gifted will always be his home. 

BBTSCB

Standing in the presence of Charles Xavier is always an awe-inspiring experience, ask anyone really, but like most things, Tony takes it to a whole new level. 

He faints. Or at least, that’s what it looks like to the non-psi sensitive individuals present. In reality, Tony slips. Backwards. 

He tries so hard to stop it, caught completely off guard, losing control like he hasn’t since well…ever. Charles tries to grab him, the strongest mental presence in perhaps the galaxy slipping across Tony’s mind like water, searching for a purchase. 

Their powers mix like oil and vinegar, dynamite exploding across space and time. 

Tony slips back as his body hits the ground with a crack, everything resolidifying too fast for Bruce to catch him from his position an inch from Tony’s elbow. 

Tony pries his eyes open just long enough to make out the blurry figure hovering at Charles’ side who he could swear wasn’t there a second before. 

Tony slips into unconsciousness with an “oh crap!” on his lips, his eyes slowly forced closed on the sight of a wedding ring glinting on Charles Xavier’s hand, the hand currently joined with that of his apparent husband of thirty years, Erik Lensherr. 

Oh crap indeed. 

Tony doesn’t remember what he changed in those milliseconds. Aside from the new addition of Erik, who fits in so well even Charles never remembers him not being there, nothing seems different. That he can see. They never find out the trigger, why Tony slipped in that moment, whether it was the shear combination of Charles and Tony’s powers merging(inexplicable and unlikely due to their previous encounter and subsequent sixty year friendship) or something else entirely. 

It will be another three years before they figure out exactly what happened, what Tony did, what he changed. It will be the moment that he realizes he’s fallen for Bruce more completely than he previously thought possible. A redundant but still heartbreaking revelation. It will repair his heart, and give him his soul back. But that, even for Tony, is in the future.

For now.


End file.
